Fundamentals Of Jainism

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Veer Nirvan Bharti

Page 22

14
FUNDAMENTALS OF JAINISM
uncreate. This amounts to saying that the line of existence of every soul merges in infinity both in the past and the future, so that each and every living being has a history of his own, however much he might be ignorant of the events of his earlier lives in his present incarnation.
In respect of the causes of the ensoulment of a jiva in the body of matter, it is to be observed that in its natural purity the soul is the enjoyer of perfect wisdom, unlimited perception, infinite power and unbounded happiness, which, in the absence of a restraining force or body of some kind, must be deemed to be manifested in the fullest degree in its nautre. The idea of such a perfect being descending to inhabit a body of flesh and thereby crippling its natural unlimited perfection, in a number of ways, is too absurd to be entertained for a moment. It follows from this that the soul did not exist in a condition of perfection prior to its present incarnation, and that the existence of some force capable of dragging jiras into different wombs is a condition precedent to their birth in the several grades of life. But how shall we conceive force operating on soul and dragging it into an organism, if not as the action of some kind of matter? It is, therefore, clear that the soul must have been in union with some kind of matter prior to its birth in any given incarnation.
So far as the nature of matter which is found in union with the soul in its pre-natal state is concerned, it most obviously must be of a very sūkshma (fine) quality, since the fertilized ovum, which roughly speaking, is the starting point of the life of an organism is itself a very minute, microscopical structure. The body of this fine material, called the kârmâna sarira (the body of karmic matter), in the technical language of the Jaina Siddhanta, is the cause and instrument of transmigration, and, along with the one called the taijasa* sarira (body of radiant matter), is a constant
*The Flectric body taijasa sarıra (¤¤) is a body of luminous matter, and is a necessary link between the other two bodies of the soulthe karmana and the audarika (the body of gross matter). The necessity for a link of this kind is to be found in the fact that the matter of the harmâna sarira is too sūkshma (fine) and that of the audarika too gross to allow any direct or immediate interaction between them, and that an intermedia type of matter is required to connect them with each other.